President Trump has not banned Muslims from entering the country. Any news outlet reporting that does not deserve your time. Such dramatics are what got Trump elected in the first place, and after last week, it appears the left is working hard on a second term.
To say this is a Muslim ban is beyond misleading. If this was a Muslim ban, India and Indonesia should have been on the top of the list as the countries with the two largest Muslim populations in the world, with almost one quarter of the world’s Islamic population between them. Only one country, Iran, out of the 10 with the largest Muslim populations in the world is on Trump’s list.
What Trump did was temporarily suspend entry to the United States from seven countries identified in December 2015 as areas of concern by the Obama administration, increasing necessary documentation to enter the US from these countries.
The roll out of this policy was abysmal. No, it should not have been applied to current green card holders. Yes, people currently in transit should have been exempted.
Looking forward, however, the policy on the whole is reasonable and in many ways does not go far enough.
Noticeably absent on the list of problem countries are Pakistan and Afghanistan, two countries embroiled in their own wars with jihadis.
The Heritage Foundation, a Washington think tank, maintains a list of Islamic terror plots, both successful and prevented. The number of Muslim immigrants appearing on the list is indeed surprising and indicative of the failures of our current screening system.
Also, the FBI does not publish details about most of the plots they foil. Heritage is just working from publicly available data. Who knows how many lives would have been lost if not for our intelligence operations.
Therefore, the real number of foiled plots is higher, probably much higher.
ISIS is certainly interested in infiltrating refugee groups, using them as a cover to gain entry to Western nations. Testifying to the Senate during his tenure as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe for NATO forces, General Philip Breedlove spoke of how ISIS is “spreading like a cancer” among refugee groups.
Even more concerning than this are the terror attacks carried out by the children of immigrants, such as the Pulse Nightclub shooter in Orlando. As the Washington Times points out, these individuals have been a fruitful recruiting ground for jihadist organizations. These are American citizens that should have been assimilated and worrying about their grades and that girl down the street, not violent religious interpretation.
A temporary ban is justifiable. Indeed, if you are going to help other people, you first need to put yourself in a position to help. There’s no point in taking in refugees trying to escape the bloody carnage of Jihad only to allow that slaughter to follow them to the streets of Boston, San Bernardino and New York.
I want to help refugees. But to help them, we first have to help ourselves.
